Wind Turbine Project

Author	Message
Adriaan Kragten Newbie Joined: 14/10/2015 Location: Netherlands Posts: 31	Posted: 08:23am 27 Feb 2026         Yendor said   Thanks Adriaan for your response. You are clearly an extremely smart person with multiple degrees. I am a retired Airconditioning Mechanic trying to fashion a rudimentary wind generator made from a used washing machine motor and using other scrap materials in regional Australia with ideas gathered from several YOUTUBE videos. There are 10 different wiring configurations available on the Back Shed website i could choose but needed some advice on which would be the most effective with a home made vertical blade rotor. Thankyou again for your help. If the winding of your generator is as I supposed in my second post, you have 36 coils wound arund 36 iron cores. The coil sequence is U1, V1, W1, U2, V2, W2, U3, V3, W3 and so on. I suppose that all twelve coils of one phase are connected in series but you have to check this by following the wires from coil to coil. This gives the highest DC voltage if the 3-phase current is rectified with a 3-phase rectifier. If this voltage is too high for what you want you can modify the winding by cutting the correct wires and making new connections. If you make two bundles of six coils and connect these in parallel, the voltage halves and the current doubles. Other options are three bundles of four coils, four bundles of three cols, six bundles of two coils and all twelve coils connected in parallel. The first thing you have to do with your generator is to check if it really has 144 preference postions per revolution by rotating the armature very slowly and counting all peaks in one revolution. If you count 144 peaks, it means that the armature has 48 poles. You can also remove the stator and using a small magnet check if one curved magnet has really four poles. The second thing you have to do is to measure the peak on the cogging torque. This can be done by connecting a rope at a certain arm with lenght r and adding weights to the end of this rope. This procedure is explained in KD 745. Once you know the peak on the starting torque in Nm, you have to design a windmill rotor which can supply this torque at lambda = 0 for a reasonable wind speed. Therefore at least you have to study my report KD 35 and KD 196. Matching is described in chapter 8 of KD 35. I also advise you to read the note: "Sequence of KD-reports for self-study" given at the top of the list with KD-reports. Designing a good wind turbine isn't simple and you need a lot of knowledge and experience to get a good result. Never build a windturbine without a proper safety system (see KD 485). If you want a VAWT, a Darrieus rotor is no option because it has no starting torque. Then you can better take a 2-phase Savonious rotor (see KD 599). An alternative Savonious rotor with four buckets is described in KD 703. However, important disadvantages of Savonious rotors are that they require a lot of material and that it is impossible to limit the rotational speed and thrust at high wind speeds. Edited 2026-02-27 19:03 by Adriaan Kragten